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That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.
Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth), and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.
“if you’re the villain in someone else’s love story, then I’m the devil.”
“I’m always scrappy,” I say. “Tonight I’m just not bothering to hide it.”
Which is good, because my reckless decisions always have disastrous consequences.
Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.
“A good bookstore,” Charlie says, “is like an airport where you don’t have to take your shoes off.”
“There isn’t for women either. There’s just tall women,” he says, “and the men too insecure to date them.”
I feel like I’m sugar under a blowtorch, like he’s caramelizing my blood.
Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world. It’s a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.
“Maybe I just say the right thing for you.”
“You’re not the person who buys the stationary bike as part of a New Year’s resolution, then uses it as a coatrack for three years. You’re not the kind of woman who only works hard when it feels good, or only shows up when it’s convenient. If someone insults one of your clients, those fancy kid gloves of yours come off, and you carry your own pen at all times, because if you’re going to have to write anything, it might as well look good. You read the last page of books first—don’t make that face, Stephens.” He cracks a smile in one corner of his mouth. “I’ve seen you—even when you’re shelving,
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“Of course I fucking do,” he says in a low, rough voice. “I can’t stop. I’m always aware of where you are, even if I don’t look, but it’s impossible not to. I want to see your face get stern when you’re emailing a client’s editor, being a hard-ass, and I want to see your legs when you’re so excited about something you just read that you can’t stop crossing and uncrossing them. And when someone pisses you off, you get these red splotches.” His fingers brush my throat. “Right here.”
“Do you know how fucking lucky anyone you care about is?
“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and—I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”
That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.
“I have no interest in going easy on you, Nora,”
“You fucking undo me,”
“We’re going to do this right. No shortcuts.”
But I was trying to live up to a memory, the phantom of someone we’d both loved.
“I’ll go anywhere with you.”
Sometimes, even when you start with the last page and you think you know everything, a book finds a way to surprise you.
Anything for you,
“If I had to pick one person to be in my corner, it’d be you. Every time.
